I wanted to see how the men wore sorry across their lips.īut some shard of my teenage self did not want to interfere with the equilibrium of that afternoon economics class, or anything else. Then the officer told me the soccer players did not know whom they had scared, but they wanted to apologize face-to-face. He wore the sweatshirt of his boarding school and had the blunt, forgettable attractiveness of a Ken Doll. When he mentioned some names, I recognized one as someone who sat behind me in microeconomics, a guy who had already smiled and retrieved a pencil that I dropped on the floor. That did not make me feel safer, but it did make me feel foolish: like I should have been in on the joke. Security staff had already spoken with the guys: they were very sorry about their inebriated “prank”. The officer told me these were first-year soccer players who had been initiated. These were the faces I would think of, years later, when reading about the ancient warrior men who, masqueraded as wolves, did things they would never do as men. “Creepy as heck with their faces and hands covered like that.” I nodded. The officer ran a hand through his hair, shaking his head. A friendly man with a baritone voice ushered me on to the edge of a plastic office chair, where I watched a stream of silent video that showed the men keying into one of the dorms, jostling one another in the foyer like herded cows. Their headquarters was behind the little white house where I had just attended my first student newspaper meeting, and I kept my head low as I walked the driveway, trying not to feel like a snitch. The next day, an officer called me to confirm their identity on camera footage. Within minutes of arriving back at my dorm, I called campus security and reported the masked men. This meant one thing in an ecosystem such as Yellowstone national park, but his logic could be applied to stories about other species too. It was a well-known maxim in the field, that you could not study one without the other. “T he prey controls the predator,” a biologist who worked in government wolf management once told me. The villainy of wolf is propped up by the foolishness of girl. Little Red’s problem is not that she has happened upon bad luck, it is that she has bad wiring. In the original telling of Little Red, she is punished for being spoiled, gullible and absentminded, and the wolf is animated in her inverse. She reminded me I could not see the “symbolic biology” of the wolf without seeing what – whom – the “beast” was supposed to be chasing. The book had a Kewpie-like girl on the cover, described inside as “rather forgetful, as you know, she did not think enough when she was told to do, or not to do something, that was why she was naughty sometimes, she did not mean to be, but she ‘forgot’”. The library said it was from 1911 online someone estimated it closer to the 1890s. Years later, in graduate school, I found an old version of Little Red Riding Hood in the University of Minnesota archive. Finally, my body pushed through their bodies and ran. I waited for their hands to reach for me they did not. What happened to my body is that it froze. I do not need to tell you what my heart did in those moments, or for the rest of the night or for the nights that followed. The white athletic socks they wore on their hands turned their fingers into paws. They did not speak, but they stared, and when I looked back, I saw their faces were masked in white cotton T-shirts, with slits for eyes and mouth. When we were a few feet apart, the line of guys formed a tight semi-circle around me. I was used to seeing others returning from the library at this hour, and I imagined the group would murmur hello as we slouched past one other. Besides, this was a small town of students and retirees on the Maine coast. Some sparkplug in the root of my spine told me to panic, but I was what my parents called “jumpy” and I was trying to learn to control it. Their bodies were muscular, solid as a wall of trees. I could not tell if they were talking, but they had the straight gait of people who were not engaged in conversation but purpose. I do not know whether to call them men or boys. As I rounded the curve of a shadowy path about 200 yards from my front door, I saw a pack of guys walking toward me through the trees.
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